That clownface pic is very useful. Also has the perk that its much easier to explain to the raid that your 'positions are like a clown face"! Thanks to who posted it, it gave me a lightbulb moment

We had 0 resists there on live server, and I'm fairly certain they have been removed. On our PTR raids, the Boss was resisting a lot, basically at least once every pull.

I got a taunt resist last night, which caused a wipe. My thinking is that they give taunts full hit cap, with the exception of the 1% void that can never be filled.


Now, a more specific scenario to discuss in regards to paladins and specifically ret paladins. We only have two holy paladin in for the fight (healer config = resto druid, 3x resto shaman, 2 holy paladin, 1 holy priest). I really don't want to pull out the priest, in favor of another paladin. In this case, I brought in an undergeared ret pally in favor of a 2K+ rogue. Stuck him in a non-melee group, as a soaker, and hoped for as much DPS as he could provide. He had no WF, and no BS. I think he pulled around 1050 DPS. Now how many feel the trade-off between keeping up judgements easier, the imp crusader, and an extra paladin buff is worth? Worth swapping out about 1K DPS for?

I dont think so. 1050 dps is really bad for a Sunwell tier guild hoping to down Brutallus. He would need your other dpsers to carry him big time.

We killed him with the ret in the raid this week and last, I am just trying to clean up config a little bit.

If you killed him, keep helping him get some ret gear. A holy paladin or two having to worry about keeping up judgements on that fight _could_ lead to tank healing issues.

You're killing Brutallus and questioning the effect of kings for dps? For a t6 level rogue you're talking 70-80ap, 2crit alone. Kings isn't so big on casters, but for agi/str classes its quite huge.

I have never run math on it. I would have ventured a guess to be somewhere around where you put it, but in TBC I swapped from DPS warrior to tank, and don't do a whole lot of exact theory crafting for DPS classes. Would my question have sounded better if I said "It would be nice to know the exact effect on kings for all DPS classes"?

EDIT: We also always run at least 3+ pally, so I never had to examine it so close.

According to the latest rogue spreadsheet I downloaded... a full Hyjal/BT geared raid buffed rogue in an optimal melee group on a full debuffed mobs... Kings = ~70DPS and Might = ~90DPS. Would take some more work to figure out what the other DPS classes game from Kings in that same setting. I just happend to be looking at the Rogue spreadsheet earlier today...

No, you can still have a taunt resisted, it's probably just that 1% that can't be mitigated whatsoever. We definitely experienced a taunt resist.

Due to group comp issues, I ended up in the tank group last night with no BS/Totems/ILotP etc. While this is by no means ideal (I ended up with ~1200DPS which was close to max according to the Ret DPS spreadsheet), it is doable for a kill. I don't see putting/being in a slash group, though.

It's interesting that you mention the armor bonus talent. The fun thing that I was doing for our kill was bouncing my chains off of the tanks a majority of the time. Due to our positioning they'd be able to jump from the tank to almost any of the rest of the soak group quite easily and looking at our warrior tank's buff gains for the fight, he gained Ancestral Fortitude 12 times and Inspiration 5 times, so 255 seconds of uptime not counting the buffs getting refreshed and lasting longer than 15 seconds, our bear tank gained AF 16 times and Inspiration 7 times which is 345 seconds uptime(almost the entire fight). 25% armor is nothing to scoff at if you've got a warrior as one of your tanks, every bit helps especially when he gets Stomped.

I'm just hearing about the changes to Brutallus and wondering, according to those pictures, your soak group is still getting hit (he does 180 degress now) while not being around the tank, aka they have more room to work with? Is this the case or am I completely mistaken. Cause if they aren't soaking, then you have a tank taking all the dmg and that doesnt seem right either. Please, someone clarify?

Well, from what I can tell a sufficiently geared warrior with Ironshield Potion on will have something like 22,000 armor (64.7% mitigation). With Ancestral/Inspiration up he has 27500ish armor (69.7% mitigation). This means the player is taking 30.3% damage from a hit instead of 35.3% damage from a hit... so the relative difference is that they take 35.3/30.3=1.165 or 16.5% more damage without the armor buff as with it.

I am not clear how the buff interacts with Stomp. It could add in after or at the same time as Stomp. That is, it could either make Stomp reduce total armor value to 75% of what it normally, is, or it could make Stomp reduce Armor value to 50*1.25=62.5% of what it normally is.

Stomped (no armor buff) = 48% mitigation
Stomped (if armor buff gives you 75% of normal) = 58% mitigation (without would be 21% more)
Stomped (if armor buff gives you 62.5% of normal) = 53.5% mitigation (without would be 11.5% more)


I'm seeing some healers in WWS with much higher crit than their gear apparently gives them... i.e. 20% crit when they're getting 9% from gear... so I'm wondering if guilds are composing/planning around this buff or not. I'm also curious, of course, which way the Stomp armor reduction works, if anyone knows. =)

We found that focusing on keeping up AF/Inspiration to be pretty much make or break for us after our night of PTR experience. We had Paladins and Druids healing only. After the raid I was like hey this isn't like the rest of BC content, we actually need to help our tanks out. So we planned for having a solo HPriest spamming flash on the tank to keep Inspiration up full time.

Now the strat is even better with priests big healing and shaman also healing off the tank.

I'm not sure if this helps, but the armor I get up to with Inspiration up and of course Ironshield is a fair bit higher than your estimation, with same typical gearing:

ImageShack - Hosting :: armorbuffkk5.jpg

The max hits I take without stomp up are in the 5.5k range, with 600 blocked. That's with Demo up. With Stomp up, the max I've ever seen is ~10.5k, which is on the very high end, the norm seem to be 9k main hands during stomp. If someone had a screenshot of their armor reading with Stomp debuff up it would help out a lot, I'll have to remember to take one next time.

That does help actually, thanks. I thought my armor numbers were low from what I remembered tanks stating, but I was looking over armories of a few of the warrior tanks from guilds that killed this, adding about 3k, and ending up at ~22000. I'm guessing I left out armor added via, say, GoA & MoW and Kings. I'll try to recalc later based on your value.

Yes, that is the way it worked for us, and we based our positioning on that (it worked).

There is MUCH more room to work with as people can space out further back -- which means easier transportation of burn victims, and easier to have healers/totems/auras in range because of the 180 degree angle you can now use.

The only downside to the increased angle of the slash is that the two soaker groups need to be slightly further apart to avoid getting each other's slash. This corresponds to a reduced angle that is always 'behind the target' for the melee, roughly a 90 degree arc (once again, as seen on the clownface last page denoted by the pink and yellow lines)

Since we farmed a bit of trash today primarily, we got late to Kalecgos and only played with Brutallus to find out what the angle is. It is not 180 degrees. More like 120 but from his middle point. Since he's so big, that means at the point where the tank is usually standing it appears as if it's a line at rectangular angle. But you can in fact stand in front of the MT and then you don't need to walk far to the side to be safe.

I took intermission's painting and added how we found it today:

Devotion Aura is also amazing to have for the tanks if they are eating the stomps (2 tank method)

Ironically, the mechanics of Brutallus almost turns the normal "awesome raid healers" into the best tank healers and vice versa.

A resto druid is perfect for burn healing, and requires only minimal help during the final 10 seconds unless burn spreads. They are pretty bad for tank healing here, since the damage is so notoriously bursty.

A resto shaman is able to heal tanks, keep AF up, and heal the entire soak groups at the same time, so it's an obvious choice to have them target most of their chain heals on the tank.

For priests, CoH efficiency drops a bit when chain heals are healing random members of the raid instead of targeting specific groups. Additionally, your first priest wants to be Improved DS for this fight for dps (unless you alt log), so he loses CoH. Finally, 2.4 spirit changes make priests significantly better GHeal spammers. In the end, we just left them on the tanks.

Holy paladins are obviously best as tank healers as usual.

So yeah, the inspiration/AF issue solves itself.

I'm not so sure about the angle you mention, at least in the diagram. You drew almost a 90 degree angle. I say this mainly because we had a person get slash when they were part of the green eye when the blue eye was tanking. They were standing right where the top blue arrow is in the picture you edited. This is outside the drawn blue angle, but inside the hitbox tangent. Then again, that area is probably part of the 120 angle if you had drawn it slightly wider... and its hard to match Brutallus' area to a 2d image.

I think we're just getting into semantics here anyway. There is plenty of room so it's all sort of a mute point. Seeing as though this new angle/range rules-out the "3 different soak groups" strat (as far as I can tell), which would be the only time the angle has to be so exact, it doesnt really matter.


Thanks for giving my clown an eye patch by the way. Fit's well with the <Avast> / pirate guild theme!